


Genesis

by infelixsoror



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F, F/M, References to Drug Use, references to forced prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-09
Updated: 2012-11-09
Packaged: 2017-11-18 07:53:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/558616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infelixsoror/pseuds/infelixsoror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Hackett is sent to earth in search of missing marines, his only hope is a young streetrat called Shepard, who’s just desperate enough to make a deal with the devil she doesn’t know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Genesis

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the 2012 ME bigbang. Art is by the lovely Alishatorn - go to her tumblr (http://alishatorn.tumblr.com/) or her lj (http://alishatorn.livejournal.com/) and give her some much deserved love!

  
  
xxx  
Once upon a time, Steven Hackett had seriously thought that he would one day reach a point in his career where he could stop cleaning up other people’s mistakes. In reality, a higher pay grade just meant bigger mistakes to tidy away and his promotion to Operations Chief had come with an order poorly masquerading as a request to find out how the hell two marines and a specialist had disappeared during a standard shore leave.  
  
Any hopes of settling the matter quickly and easily died when he saw the last known location of the missing soldiers. There were plenty of reasons to go to Riverside, but none of them were good. If the Iowa government hadn’t been so skilled at subtly denying the place’s existence, the area would have been notorious for its gang and slaver problems, its obscenely high crime rate and its equally high Unregistered population.  
  
It was also a place where the official channels were essentially non-existent; finding the missing troops was going to take a hell of a lot more ingenuity than filing the average report required. Odds were that was why Hackett had been assigned to this particular job; his paperwork skills were pretty spectacularly outshone by his ability to improvise.  
  
And it probably didn’t hurt that he already had friends in the area. Well, more of a friend, singular, but that would have to do. Gibson, a woman who’d been closer to a girl the last time Hackett had seen her, met him at Iowa Central Transport.  
  
“I have to say I was surprised to get your message,” she said once they’d cleared security. “Been a long time since you saved my neck from a cuttlefish so I figure you’re here to ask for a favour. Or maybe to declare that you can’t live another day without me, but if that’s the case, you’re going to be disappointed.”  
  
Hackett smiled. “As much as I would love to steal you away from your very scary wife, I’m here for work. You hear about the missing Alliance folk?”  
  
“Aw, shit, Hackett, I can’t help you with that.” You know, it’s really bad form to give a girl a opportunity to settle an old debt and then ask for something she can’t do.”  
  
“But I thought you were heading up that Riverside Taskforce thing.”  
  
“Yeah, I was. Then I arrested the governor’s nephew.”  
  
“Wrongfully?”  
  
“Rightfully. Which probably made it worse, now that I think about it.” Gibson sighed. “I’m sorry, but the taskforce was the last real Alliance presence in this area, Hackett. If you’re hoping for an official investigation, you’re shit out of luck.”  
  
“And if my heart was more set on the ‘investigation’ part than the ‘official’ part?”  
  
Gibson smiled in that way that he’d last seen just before the girl had gone and blown up a turian scout vessel. “Then we might still be in business.”  
  
xxx  
Hackett had long suspected that the Riverside Taskforce was nothing more than a token effort on the part of the Alliance and a single look at their headquarters justified every single one of those suspicions. He wasn’t even sure if two rooms with one computer could even be called a ‘headquarters’. Admittedly, it had probably looked at least a little more impressive when the Taskforce had still existed. They might even have had some actual people doing some actual work at one time.  
  
“I’d offer you coffee, but it looks like Morello stole the pot,” Gibson said, walking past the handful of abandoned desks to the far wall. “Fortunately, the computers are a little harder to take home at the end of the day.”  
  
She fired up the main monitor. The screen flickered, nothing but static, and Gibson thumped the corner with what was obviously a well-practised manoeuvre.  
  
“Please tell me they haven’t already cut this place off from the info-feeds,” Hackett said, leaning against one of the old desks.  
  
“Believe it or not, my connection has actually improved since I was shut down,” Gibson replied. “There’s a kid in Riverside who should be able to help you, but you can’t exactly make an appointment. This set-up gets me into the enforcers’ system; if they’ve seen her recently, it might help us find her. And by ‘us’, I do of course mean you.”  
  
After a few more well-placed thumps, the screens finally started to cooperate. Hackett watched, waiting as patiently as he could manage, while Gibson skimmed through endless datafeeds with subtle confidence. She’d been good at this job, he realised. So good that someone somewhere had decided to take it away from her.  
  
“We’re in luck; she’s with the enforcers right now. That’s her,” Gibson said, tapping one of the security feeds. “She’s unregistered so we have no family or medical history and no date of birth. No schooling, either, so no aptitude scores, no psych profile.”  
  
“Criminal record?” Hackett asked, stepping up next to Gibson to peer at the image.  
  
It was high quality for enforcer work and gave him a clear enough look at the girl. Young, thin, red hair that looked more as if it had been hacked off than cut short. Her clothes looked too big, or maybe she just looked too small, curled in the corner of a windowless cell. Hackett couldn’t see any ink on her arms or face; the only modification seemed to be a glint of silver on her left eyebrow.  
  
“Officially, she doesn’t have one. You can’t arrest an Unreg, Hackett. There’s no way to even put that kid through booking without making her a full Alliance citizen. If she did have one, well, it would probably include violence, going armed, theft. Possibly the odd case of extortion and bribing officials. She’s got a good eye for people’s weak-spots.”  
  
“But you trust this girl.”  
  
“Shepard’s given me more good intel over the last eight months than the rest of Riverside combined.”  
  
“Shepard? That’s her name?”  
  
Gibson shrugged. “It’s what everyone calls her. Seems to be more of a title than a name, truth be told. She’s good at rounding things up, has this tendency to gather lost sheep and the like.”  
  
“And she’ll help me?”  
  
“Provided you don’t give her a reason not to, yes.” She tapped the screen a few times, bringing up a datafeed. “Central might’ve shut me down, but I can still pull a few strings. The enforcers will be releasing Shepard within the hour; I’d advise following her once she leaves their facility. All you gotta do is wait for the right moment to introduce yourself.”  
  
“Any advice on how to approach her?”  
  
“Outside of petty theft, she makes most of her living from dealing in information. Tell her what you want to know, agree to pay whatever she asks for. It won’t be a lot.”  
  
“That’s it? No deals, no threats, no leverage?”  
  
“I can think of one or two things along those lines which might work, but I wouldn’t advise going down that route, not when you can keep it simple. Anything else can go too wrong too quickly and if Shepard doesn’t like you, she won’t help you.”  
  
“And she’s my best hope of finding my people, I understand that.”  
  
“I’m not sure that you do, mainly because Shepard is, at this point, your only hope of finding out _what happened_ to your people. Those who go missing from Riverside do not turn up alive and well. If you came here to bring those guys home, you’re far too late.”  
  
“There’s always hope, Gibson.”  
  
“Not in Riverside.”  
  
xxx  
Getting pulled in by the enforcers was a fairly regular part of Shepard’s life. Not her favourite part, admittedly, but never really a surprise. The stranger part was the one where they didn’t even get around to asking her any questions before kicking her back out and the strangest part was the one where they’d actually remembered to give her back her boots and jacket, something which hadn’t happened since the last time Gibson had tried to impress her. Hell, they’d even given back her bootlaces and that was so strange it was flat-out unsettling.  
  
Things going differently was almost always a sign of greater shit to come.  
  
And so she made sure to take the long route out of enforcer turf and back into the Dockyards proper. It meant cutting through spicer streets, but for once it seemed quiet. Quiet enough that she could hear the man following her from three buildings away. Shepard shifted directions, heading across the remnants of spicer turf, dipping into the Reds’ territory and finally back to the enforcers’. Her irritating new friend followed each twist and turn, always staying just far enough behind her to convince her that he wasn’t a complete idiot.  
  
Finally, having had just about enough, she ducked around the corner of one building and used a convenient pile of abandoned crates to get herself up unto the roof. Moments like this, she almost wished she carried a gun, but the things were too damn expensive when the enforcers would be only too happy to take them straight back out of her hands. They’d missed the knife in her boot, though, and a decent blade was always a comfort.  
  
She kept the knife within easy reach as she waited for the man to turn the right corner; crouching on the edge of a roof wasn’t particularly comfortable, but it did have its advantages. The building she was perched on top of was old, pre-Contact, only two stories high. High enough to keep her out of the man’s reach, low enough that they could talk. Of course, if the man wasn’t in the mood to talk or if Shepard didn’t like what he said, well, the building was also low enough for her to throw a knife at the guy.  
  
“You know, Gibson always gives up when I start on the spin-around,” Shepard said when he finally came back into sight.  
  
The man hid his surprise well, even managed a smile. “I’m more persistent than she is.”  
  
“Or you’re a lot stupider than she is,” she replied. “And I thought Alliance boots had better things to do than stomp around this shithole.”  
  
“I wanted to talk to you.”  
  
“Seems more like you wanted to stalk me. But, hey, you got something to say, I’m listening.”  
  
“Three of my people went missing from this area; I want to know what’s happened to them and Gibson said you could help.”  
  
And just like that, it was Shepard’s turn to hide her surprise.  
  
“Did Gibson also say that I don’t work for free?”  
  
The man reached into a pocket; Shepard’s fingers tightened around the knife, but all he pulled out was a credit chip.  
  
“Well, that’s a different matter,” Shepard continued smoothly. “Who am I looking for? And don’t give me names, names don’t mean shit down here.”  
  
“Two marines, one male, one female, and one engineer, also male. They all went on leave sixteen days ago and failed to report for duty twelve days ago.”  
  
“What was their thing?”  
  
“Thing?”  
  
“What were they into?” Shepard elaborated. “Drugs, little boys, little girls?”  
  
“Nothing like that as far as I know. I think they were trying to sell something. Something which wasn’t theirs to sell.”  
  
“Figured as much. If it was rightfully theirs, they wouldn’t have needed to come here to sell it. And no one comes here ‘less they have to. Can you tell me what they were selling?”  
  
The man shook his head. “I’ve got people looking at what they had access to, but I don’t know for sure. Is that going to be a problem?”  
  
“Might make it harder for me to get you anything concrete, but I can still get you something.”  
  
“How do I contact you?”  
  
Shepard grinned. “You don’t. There’s a med clinic couple of blocks away from the enforcer building. When I have something for you, Gibson will get told she’s got an appointment there. Doesn’t matter to me which one of you keeps that appointment, but someone should show up.”  
  
“Someone will.”  
  
She nodded, straightened up and took a step back from the edge. “Then I’ll be in touch.”  
  
“My name’s Hackett, in case you were wondering,” the man called when she was already walking away across the rooftop.  
  
“I don’t give a damn about your name,” she called back, breaking into a run. There was a clear line across the rooftops all the way to the old factory district, and she had a long way to go.  
  
Odds were that the man would be able to find out where she lived, especially if Gibson was on his side, but it never hurt to be careful. Besides, she thought a lot better when she was moving and this job was going to require a fair bit of thought.  
  
On the one hand, it had the potential to be the easiest job she’d pulled for a long time. Seeing Alliance boots in an area that was going to see credits rain from the sky long before it saw any sort of official presence on the streets, well, people would remember that kind of thing. Not to mention that there were only a few guys in Riverside who’d have the weight to want to deal with Alliance types wanting to sell what wasn’t theirs, and even fewer who’d be stupid enough to stop those boots from walking safely home again.  
  
Of course, that small group of even fewer people was pretty much full of people which Shepard could greatly increase her life expectancy by avoiding entirely.  
  
But it wasn’t wise to spend too long outside in Riverside after dark, particularly when you were distracted, and so she eventually ducked down the alley next to the Faded Rose and popped open the old vent. She made sure to close it again behind her; it wouldn’t do much to stop those that really wanted to get through, but the enforcers were generally too lazy to go somewhere that wasn’t already open to them unless they were feeling particularly motivated.  
  
Shepard climbed down the broken ladders, shimmering down the odd bit of intact piping or less-intact wall, until she was about four stories underground and suddenly remembering why she normally avoided the Faded Rose entrance. The route, although pretty damn irritating after the sort of day Shepard had had, did eventually start leading into the Undercity.  
  
She passed the usual fringe settlements, the newcomers too scared or too proud to move further in where they’d be safer. There was a gap just past Gran Norton, one that Shepard only noticed when the lack of insane religious ramblings finally registered; people disappeared from the Undercity all the time, but the Preacher had been in that spot for as long as Shepard could remember. That sort of change was normally bad news. Just like enforcers’ letting people go without warnings.  
  
The Undercity proper was a maze of roughly constructed buildings, none of them really deserving that name, most of the walls only still standing because of all the other walls leaning against them. It was rarely quiet and never still and Shepard moved slowly, stopping to trade odds bits of information with those she trusted, trying to keep track of who had gone and who had stayed, but mostly failing. There were too many people to count and too many reasons for leaving that she could ever learn.  
  
There were worse places to grow up, Shepard supposed, but they were hard to imagine.  
  
Her destination was one of the many shacks, not really any different from the thousands of others down here. She tried the door, on the off chance, but wasn’t surprised when it refused to move and simply started knocking. Three-two-three-two, over and over, steady as you like.  
  
“Let me guess,” Shepard said when the door finally opened. “You gave my food away.”  
  
Kes smiled, leaning against the door-jamb. “I thought you’d be in for the night. Possibly for most of the week.”  
  
“Gibson,” Shepard replied, answering the unspoken question. “I really thought getting fired would make her stop pulling my strings.”  
  
“She’s dedicated, you have to admit.”  
  
“Still be happier if she could dedicate herself to something other than me.”  
  
“If she keeps you out of enforcer cells, I’m all for it,” Kes said, stepping back inside. “Come on, you.”  
  
Shepard obeyed, following Kes into the tiny room. Their few blankets were already spread across the floor and Shepard paused only to yank off her boots before crawling under the nearest one. The Undercity was always cold and it was only going to get colder for the next few months.  
  
Kes settled herself next to Shepard, legs neatly crossed and comb in her hand. The messy braid probably didn’t need a whole lot of combing, not really, but she knew how much Shepard liked watching this particular ritual. “I saved you a fake fruit bar. Strawberry flavoured. What did Gibson want?”  
  
“For me to help a friend of hers find some people. Guy’s either desperate or incredibly naive, he paid me up front.” Shepard finally managed to get the wrapper off the fruit bar with some slightly excessive application of teeth.  
  
“And yet you sound less than thrilled.”  
  
She swallowed the last mouthful of the fruit bar. “I think I’d need to deal with the Reds to get the right answers to this one.”  
  
The comb stopped. “Then you don’t need to take the job.”  
  
“We need the money, Kes. You know we need the money.”  
  
“I know we do,” she replied softly, reaching out to touch Shepard’s cheek. “But I hate the way you feel when you come back from that place.”  
  
Shepard leaned forward, burying her head against Kes’ shoulder. “So long as I get to come back,” she said, just as quietly, hating herself for being unable to say it while looking Kes in the eye, “So long as I get to come back to this, I don’t care.”  
  
  
                                                                ([Artist](http://alishatorn.tumblr.com/post/35328195541/based-on-and-created-for-genesis-by-infelixsoror))  
  
Kes wrapped her arms around her, pressing a kiss to the top of her head before prodding Shepard into lying down properly. She let go just long enough to shut off their one flickering lamp and then was back, curled up around Shepard.  
  
“Hey, Kes?” Shepard whispered into the dark.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Do real strawberries taste like that?”  
  
xxx  
The safest way of dealing with gangs was, well, not to deal with gangs. Everyone knew that. But sometimes the only way to get anything done in Riverside was to deal with the gangs. And there were a few ways to reduce (reduce, not limit, limit made it sound like they'd actually pay attention to any boundaries Shepard tried to enforce) the risk, almost all of which depended on knowing who to talk to and how to find them without attracting any of the wrong sort of attention.  
  
The wrong sort of attention, in this context, being any attention at all from Jojo.  
  
Shepard was just old enough to remember what Riverside had been like before Jojo had united most of the gangs, the endless fights and the fires that barely had time to go out before another was set; she couldn't remember what all those old gangs had been called before they been wiped off the map or dragged under the banner of the Tenth Street Reds, but she could remember what Jojo had been like, back in the days when he'd been mostly a joke, running around doing shitty errands for whatever sign would take him.  
  
She sometimes wondered if that had been his plan all along, if maybe he'd run all those shitty errands so he could learn exactly how to hurt each of the gangs that had later got in his way, if he'd been happy to be a joke because laughing people didn't expect to be stabbed in the throat.  
  
No one was laughing at him now, not at the man who controlled Riverside and everyone in it.  
  
Mind you, there was one small advantage to Jojo’s fanatical control over most of Riverside. The man had so much turf under his boots that, well, it would take some really shitty luck to end up on precisely the same spot as him at any one time. There sure as hell wouldn’t be any reason for him to be out on the borders of his fucked-up little kingdom, the territory that hadn’t been his the month before last.  
  
(One day, Shepard would learn not to think things like that, would realize that whatever fucked up power held the universe together was a little too fond of listening to her internal monologue and then laughing.)  
  
And Finney was the best man to speak to, Shepard knew that. Jojo’s last little expansion had changed a lot of things, but those didn’t include Finney’s skills or his usual haunt, or the way that he smiled at her when he caught sight of her.  
  
“Still looking for your little lost sheep?” he said, waving away the prospects gathered around him.  
  
“Something like that,” Shepard replied, waiting for the prospects to disappear back out of sight. She didn’t recognize a single one of them. “Lot of new faces around here. How many of the Sons made it through?”  
  
Finney shrugged. “Not many. Guess that’s what happens when you say ‘no’ to Jojo one too many times. Might want to learn from that example, little girl.”  
  
“I haven’t said ‘no’ to Jojo.”  
  
“You haven’t said ‘yes’, either, and he’s going to notice that sooner or later.” Finney scratched at the bloody bandages on his arm, just below the new red scarf wound around his bicep. “What do you need this time, Shepard?”  
  
“Three bodies, all full-grown, a woman and two men,” Shepard said. “Images would do, something to show the families.”  
  
“Three cases at once, that’s a lot of work for one little girl.”  
  
“Need the money,” Shepard said.  
  
Finney nodded slowly. Two months ago, she might have said more and they both knew it. And they both knew that the strip of red cloth around his arm was the reason why.  
  
“The Reds are using our old dumping ground. There might be something there you could use,” he said finally. “And there’s something else, kid. You remember Jacknife? The kid with the stupid haircut and the tattoos?”  
  
“Yeah. I worked a few jobs with him. Good eye for tech.”  
  
“Jojo had one of his little talks with him, during the patch-over. The kid wasn’t strong enough. He said some things about Kes.”  
  
“How much? Finney, how much did he tell Jojo?”  
  
“Everything. He didn’t have a choice, kid. No one does once they’ve got Jojo’s full attention.”  
  
“Yeah,” Shepard forced out. She let herself take one deep breath, then stamped ruthlessly on her emotions. This wasn’t the place, not standing opposite a Red. “Thanks for the info, man. And you look shit in red, by the way,” she added as she turned away.  
  
She’d spent a lot of time in the Sons’ territory - Jojo’s territory now, of course - and she knew precisely where their dumping ground had been, if only so she could avoid it. The Sons had been pretty restrained for a Riverside gang, most of the time there hadn’t been anything more than burning rubbish in the dumping ground. That looked like just another thing that had changed since Jojo had moved in. She found eight bodies without really looking, more than the Sons had dumped in the average year, and all of them close to daisy-fresh.  
  
Eight bodies. If only Jojo would run out of people to kill.  
  
Shepard yanked an old bandanna out of her jacket and tied it over her nose and mouth, cursed her lack of gloves and then hopped down in the shallow pit. The first three bodies were covered in Sons’ ink, the fourth was just about recognizable as Jacknife. Poor bastard. That left four possibilities, two of whom had tats that Shepard had only ever seen on soldiers before.  
  
Both the likely soldiers’ bodies seemed to be untouched. Shepard frowned, turning one of them over, tugging clothing aside in search of something, anything to explain why he’d wound up in this particular ditch. All she could find was one hole in his back, the kind caused by getting shot at close range. She found the same wound on the other soldier and a third body. Two marines and an engineer, she’d guess, all shot in the back.  
  
Not a bad death for someone in Riverside. Quick, hell of a lot less painful that some of the other shit on offer, there were definitely worse ways to go.  
  
But these bodies had been put there by the Reds, which meant by Jojo. And Jojo was always a fan of the worst way to go  
  
“Shit,” Shepard muttered, scrubbing her hands on her trousers. “Why can’t it ever go smooth?”

xxx  
She took the long route to the clinic, skirting the edge of hardcore Red territory and looping round the far side of enforcer turf, and breathed a sigh of relief when the run-down building finally came into view. Doc didn’t tolerate any gang shit on the tiny patch of Riverside that housed the one and only medical facility that the local population had ever seen, and for some reason even Jojo seemed to respect that.  
  
Shepard loitered across the street from the clinic until the Doc came out to close the shutters and spotted her.  
  
“Come here, Shep, help me lock up if you’re coming in,” he said and waited for her to slink across and hold the shutters in place for him. “And I’ve already cleaned the floors, so if you’ve been shot again-”  
  
“I haven’t been shot in months, Doc,” Shepard said.  
  
“Fair enough. In you go, then,” he said, nodding at the door. He rattled the shutters one last time before following her into the clinic. “If you haven’t been shot, why are you here?” he asked, locking the door behind them.  
  
“Maybe I missed you,” Shepard replied, sitting on the nearest examination table.  
  
“Says the girl who’s built a solid career out of never missing anyone,” Doc said, but he was smiling.  
  
“Okay, maybe I’m here on business. I need a good upstanding citizen to tip off the enforcers, dead Alliance types in the Sons’ old dumping ground. And I need you to pass the news on to a soldier called Hackett direct.”  
  
“That’s all? You’re sure there wasn’t anything else?”  
  
“Be quite nice if your boyfriend’s finished cooking up a detox for the new sand Jojo’s pushing all over the place,” Shepard said, shrugging. She’d always liked matching sarcasm with yet more sarcasm, it kept everyone on the same page.  
  
“You know he doesn’t work to demand.”  
  
“Then I guess I’ll just have to stay, oh, how did he say it? ‘Insufferably boring’ until he gets around to it.”  
  
“That’ll make him a delight to deal with, thank you for that.”  
  
“Like I need to tell you how much we need that detox.”  
  
Doc sighed, that one particularly exasperated sigh that was only every directed at Shepard. “Do you want me to reach out to Hackett? If he’s Alliance, I can find him in the system.”  
  
“Yeah. Get him here, would you? Let me know when.”  
  
“I can take the payment for you, kid, if you want to keep your distance.”  
  
“I’m not taking his money, not just yet. Might be a better deal to be made.”  
  
“You shouldn’t play games with soldiers, Shepard.”  
  
“Hey, I am game-free, I promise. Just want to talk to the man.”  
  
That got her a look, unsurprisingly, but no argument or comment. It would only be a matter of time; Doc liked talking at people, probably came with the job, and he was always ready to point out just how insane any of her ideas were. Main reason she didn’t tell him even half of what she was doing until it was done, if at all. She stretched out on the examination table, enjoying the quiet and the warm, and watched silently as he went into his tiny office, presumably to send the message, then came back out briefly before unlocking the store room and disappearing inside.  He reappeared soon enough, looking fairly unhappy, and ducked straight back into the office.  
  
“He’s on way. Poor bastard must’ve been waiting by the phone.” Doc scrubbed at his face with the back of his hand. “I am definitely going to be late home, aren’t I?”  
  
Shepard sat up and shrugged. “Unless you’re happy for me to stay here by myself.” She gave her most reassuring smile.  
  
Doc paused, clearly considering all the possible ways that could go wrong. It took him a fair while; Shepard kept the smile on her face, just in case. “Yeah, I’m going to make coffee.”  
  
Shepard’s smile changed to gently amused as Doc stomped off, this time in search of caffeine. Kes would feel bad about this, about making the man stick around all night for business he wasn’t even involved in, but those sorts of concerns only applied to Shepard when Kes was within disapproving-look range.  
  
“You ever going to tell me what’s wrong?” Doc asked when he came back, mugs in hand.  
  
“What makes you think anything’s wrong?” Shepard replied. One of the mugs went down on the table by her feet; she sat up, careful not to knock it over, and picked it up.  
  
“Well, it might have something to do with the fact that in ten years, you’ve never once asked me to get one of your clients here for a second meeting.” He sat down at his desk, shoving a stack of datapads to one side to make room for his own mug.  
  
“Jojo knows about Kes,” she said finally.  
  
“Knows that she’s a runaway?”  
  
“More than that. If this was just about Kes, well, an Unreg like Jojo can’t claim the reward, can he? Be no profit for him in getting involved.”  
  
“Do you really think he’d kill her just because you love her?”  
  
“If he knew that I wanted to leave Riverside, that I had a plan to get out that might actually work and that Kes was the reason behind all of that...” Shepard shrugged. “I don’t think there’s anything that man wouldn’t do. Except let me go.”  
  
“We’ll figure something out, kid.”  
  
“I already did. I’ll make a new deal with Hackett, see if I can’t trade information on Jojo for my citizenship. While I play that one out, Kes stays here and scrubs your damn floors, well out of sight of any Reds. Once I’ve got my papers in hand, I take Kes and get her the fuck off this rock. Away from her father, from Jojo, all of it.”  
  
“Live like real people.”  
  
“I think it takes more than a fancy document to make someone real, Doc.”  
  
“Yeah. But that’s what you have Kes for.”  
  
xxx  
In the end, it was several hours before there was a soft knock on the clinic door. Doc jerked awake, a few datapads skittering across the desk, as Shepard hopped down from the table and went to check the security feeds. The screen showed a fairly unimpressed-looking Hackett outside the clinic and very little else, so she opened the door.  
  
“I was under the distinct impression that I was never going to see you again,” Hackett said, stepping in from the dark.  
  
“Situation’s changed,” Shepard replied. “Your people were killed by a man called Jojo.”  
  
“Is there any particular reason that that information couldn’t just be sent to me?”  
  
“I wanted to talk about what happens next. You see, Jojo kills a lot of people. I found five other bodies with the ones that you seem to care about. No one official does anything, of course, because normally Jojo only kills the Unregistered. We don’t exist, not really, so no one notices when we stop existing. But, uh, the Alliance types, that’s different. You might be able to make something official out of that.”  
  
“I’m probably more aware of how the legal system works than you, kid.”  
  
“Yeah, probably,” Shepard agreed easily. “You’d know all about the stuff you’d need to convict Jojo. Stuff like fingerprints, or security feeds, maybe DNA or the murder weapon. But I know you don’t have any of them. Jojo’s Unregistered, like me. We’re not in any system. And Riverside’s got no real surveillance, outside of what Doc and the enforcers keep on their turf.”  
  
“But you’re sure it was him.”  
  
“Everyone in Riverside knows it was him,” Doc cut in. “Hell, if the enforcers had been doing their jobs for the last ten years, they’d know it too. But the way things are down here, you cannot build a conventional case against this man.”  
  
“But I’m good at finding things out. I could find something you could use against Jojo.”  
  
“Such as?” Hackett asked, crossing his arms.  
  
“Proof that Jojo has Alliance tech. Those, uh, the self-cooling mechanisms you guys use in your guns.”  
  
“Shit, kid, are you sure?” Doc asked.  
  
Shepard nodded. “It’s the only thing that fits. Those Alliance types, they were killed clean. That means they weren’t killed for fun or ‘cause they said no. Means they died because they had to.”  
  
“And if they’d handed over the tech, that would be a secret worth killing to keep. Shit, the Reds with military grade equipment, Jesus Christ,” Doc said.  
  
“How bad would that get?” Hackett asked.  
  
“Here in Riverside, not that much worse. Of course, that’s only because we’ve already hit rock bottom,” Doc said. “You need to understand that the gangs around here, they’re only armed with shitty little guns, pre-First Contact stuff, two or three shots a minute maximum without overheating. With better guns, faster guns, they could start moving out of Riverside. That would be the nightmare scenario, the Reds spreading out, going into the world. If it was any gang, hell, if it was led by any other man...”  
  
Hackett frowned. “You’re scared of this Jojo. You both are. So why would you do this? I’m assuming you don’t have a particularly strong sense of civic duty.”  
  
“I want citizenship,” Shepard said. “Doc helped me with the application, I passed the medical, the literacy, all of it, but seven months on and I haven’t heard a damn thing.”  
  
“You get the information I need to get justice for my men, I shove your application through all the right pipelines,” Hackett said slowly. “I should be able to do that, sure. Might take a few days...”  
  
“Well, not even I can get the most dangerous man in Riverside to confess to murder in twenty minutes, so that should be fine,” Shepard replied. “So we have a deal? Just to be clear, you’re not getting a damn thing until I have my citizenship papers in hand.”  
  
“I thought that might be how this works.” Hackett nodded and held out his hand. “We have a deal, kid.”  
  
Shepard looked at the hand, then at Hackett’s face, then at Doc, who rolled his eyes at her in a particularly pointed manner. “Oh, fine,” she muttered and shook the offered hand. Stupid tradition. “I’ll be in touch. Thanks, Doc,” she added, heading for the door. “We should do this again sometime.”  
  
“No, we shouldn’t!” Doc called after her.  
  
xxx  
The moment Shepard left the clinic, she started running. At times like these, she didn't think there was anything she wouldn't give to have some of those neat little communicators that the real folk were so fond of. It was never going to happen, mind you; the devices were too easy to track and to monitor, and each was linked to a registered citizen. Even if Shepard could manage to bluff her way into the real world and steal a couple, there was no way she’d ever be able to hang onto them.    
  
A girl could dream, though.  
  
But while she was dreaming, Shepard made sure to keep running. Getting to Kes, getting Kes up to speed, that was the important thing. Fortunately, she always had a pretty good idea of where her girl was. Kes was smart enough to keep her routine varied enough that it probably didn’t really count as a routine, but she balanced this with always telling Shepard what she was planning.  
  
And today, like almost all of the other days, had been devoted towards finding enough food to make it through the next day. This late in the day, Kes would be in Riverside’s one and only remaining market, bartering for the stuff that no one else wanted. Shepard had gone to meet Kes there plenty of times before; the market was a decent fixed point in the ever-shifting landscape of Riverside.  
  
Shepard paused at the edge of the market, by the mound of rusted junk that Marcus kept trying to pass off as tech, and watched Kes arguing with the old lady who specialised in long-lasting almost food. Normally, the sight of Kes in the market would be enough to improve even the shittiest of days. Not that day. Taking her eyes off Kes, Shepard scanned the market for any hint of red. The gang never came to the market like normal folk; they took what they wanted. Most of the dealers just delivered to them direct as part of their protection deals.  
  
Satisfied that none of Jojo’s little spies were within sight, Shepard crossed the market, coming up beside Kes just as she closed her deal for a handful of doubtless-expired ratpacks.  
  
“Hey, you,” Kes said, leaning into Shepard, who allowed it, just for a moment. “You’re just in time, we’re actually going to eat an almost real meal tonight.”  
  
“Yeah, that’s great, but we need to go,” Shepard said, taking hold of Kes' arm and tugging her along, trying to get her away from the too-sharp eyes and ears of the market traders.  
  
“Go where?” Kes asked as Shepard nearly dragged her down the nearest alley, purposefully avoiding the busier streets.  
  
“The clinic. You're going to be staying there for a bit.”  
  
“Oh, I am, am I?” Kes dug her heels in and pulled Shepard around to face her. “Just tell me. Whatever’s got you this twisted up, I want to know.”  
  
For a moment, just a moment, Shepard considered lying. She knew Doc would back her in whatever tale she wanted to spin for Kes, for all that he’d give her more of those disapproving looks whenever Kes wasn’t looking, and maybe there was no need to terrify Kes when they might finally be getting out of Riverside. But then the moment passed.  
  
“He knows, Kes. Jojo knows about you, about us. Maybe about all of it.”  
  
Shepard could see the moment when Kes made sense of the words. They both had their monsters; Kes had never met Jojo, and Shepard intended to keep it that way, but she knew what it meant. Just like Shepard would know what it meant if Kes turned around one day and said that her father was on his way.  
  
“Who told him?”  
  
“Jacknife. Finney's boy. It's going to be okay,” Shepard said, as if saying the words could make it true. “I've got a plan, okay, we're both getting out of here, that hasn’t changed. You just need to trust me, just for a little bit longer, and come to the clinic right now.”  
  
“I do trust you,” Kes replied. “You know I trust you.”  
  
 _Maybe you shouldn’t_ was on the tip of Shepard’s tongue, no matter that she’d asked her to plenty of times, because Kes’ monster wouldn’t so much as notice Shepard’s existence, no matter what she did for Kes, but Shepard’s monster would rip Kes’ throat out because of Shepard, because of how Kes seemed to feel about Shepard.  
  
“Come here,” Kes continued, tugging Shepard closer and wrapping her arms around her. “You’re right, you know? It’s going to be okay,” she said softly. “You can take me to the clinic and then go do whatever it is you need to do.”  
  
Shepard kissed her.  
  
It probably cheapened the romance, really, kissing someone in the somewhat-happy knowledge that it was very difficult to be kissed and look the kisser in the eye at the same time.  
  
xxx  
An hour later, with Kes safely tucked away in the securely-locked clinic, Shepard was hoping that she might finally be able to focus on some of the many, many other problems.  
  
Finding the Reds wasn’t a problem. These days, all you had to do was throw a stone anywhere outside of enforcer turf and you’d hit a Red. And then, of course, you’d have to be ready to run. The Reds didn’t take kindly to folk throwing stones at them. Hell, even finding the right Reds was a walk in the park for a girl who’d spent years learning everything she could about every last one of them. The more turf Jojo took for himself, the more people he forced into red, the more contacts Shepard had.  
  
But finding _proof_ , well, that was a new one. Most of the people Shepard dealt with just wanted answers, a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question of if they should keep waiting for their loved ones to walk through the door safe and sound, and she’d spent long enough answering questions for people in Riverside to just accept what she told them.  
  
Shepard was hoping that finding proof worked the same sort of way as finding answers, just a matter of going to the right people and having the right conversations. With the right conversations, maybe she could finally pin down where the Reds’ guns were stored, check to see what kind of specs they had. That might be enough, especially if Hackett was smart enough to prove that the dead engineer would have been in the right position to sell those kinds of secrets.  
  
But the confession... That would take a very particular conversation with a very specific man.  
  
One problem at a time. Guns first, dealing with the devil later. The Reds owned – well, ‘owned’ might be a too-legitimate term for their claim – plenty of buildings, some of them devoted to spice-dealings, full of the addled and the addicts all clustered around the designated dealer, others to Jojo’s girls and boys who, despite the name, were available to anyone who had the credits. There were the buildings reserved for semi-private business meetings, a handful of others used for those meetings which were always going to be finished with a round of gunfire. Presumably, there were buildings somewhere where the Reds could sleep and live, as Shepard had never seen anyone with a red armband sleeping rough or hunkering down in the Undercity for longer than it took to turn someone’s home over.  
  
(There were even rumours, whispered behind hands and closed doors and only to the people trusted above all others, of building filled with missing Unregs, people who hadn’t pissed Jojo off enough to die outright, who wouldn’t be missed even by the other forgotten people, waiting for the next time the slavers rolled into town. Shepard tried not to think about those rumours too much, certainly never repeated them to anyone, if only because she knew deep down that there was no way Jojo wasn’t involved in the one truly unforgiveable crime of Riverside.)  
  
But she had no damn idea where they stored their guns. Spice, yes, dead bodies, yes, but she'd never found a Reds' armoury, not once in all the time she'd had to turn over every stone in Riverside, no matter how bloody.  
  
Well, she reasoned, trying to talk herself into a plan before she managed to talk herself out of it, there must be guns where there were Reds. The barracks, they'd need defending. Maybe not as much now as when there'd been more than thirty gangs in Riverside, all fighting to the death over every little thing, but surely those places wouldn't be defenceless. Particularly if she went for one of the more established bases, not one of the ones out on the edges, where'd the Reds had been the Sons or the Jokers just weeks before. And if the guns were that new, that rare, that powerful, then Jojo wouldn't want to share them, not yet, not even with his own people.  
  
Jojo's place. Well, he had at least three of them, not to mention every other inch of Riverside that he considered his, but Shepard knew which was his favourite. The original clubhouse of the Tenth Streets Reds, built back when Riverside still had streets named and labelled like they were a real society; it was Jojo's favourite, Shepard suspected, because that was really where he rise to power had begun on that day, all those years ago, when he had walked into the leader's room with a knife in his hands and a glint in his eye and come back out bloody and smiling.  
  
Shepard managed to get within eyeshot of the place before she had to duck down behind an overflowing dumpsters, press her back against the wall and let herself shake. Fear was like any other poison; no matter how high your tolerance, there was only so much the human body could hold before something had to give.  
  
“Come on, Shep,” she whispered to herself, knocking her head gently back against the wall. “It’s just another job.”  
  
She gave herself another few minutes, just waiting for her own breathing to even out and settled down. She'd broken into more than enough buildings to know that the beginning was everything. Fuck up the first few minutes of any job and that was it. Game over, no second tries.  
  
Breaking into a Red building was fairly high-up on the list of crazy shit Shepard had done, far up enough that it probably didn't even feature on anyone else's list. That, in itself, might just give her the edge she needed. The enforcers were similarly convinced that they were untouchable and she'd taken more stuff from them than she could comfortably carry. And the enforcers had cameras, something the Reds would never waste their time with.  
  
Of course, it was going to take more than avoiding non-existent security cameras for Shepard to pull this off. Getting caught stealing from the Reds, that was an automatic death sentence. Getting caught stealing their new and improved guns, well, that would be a little worse than a death sentence.  
  
Shepard stood up and used the dumpster to get her up onto the nearest roof. Even in Riverside, where folk went above and below the streets far more than they just walked along them, people just didn't look up. She looped around Jojo's place a few times, eyeing up the walls, judging distances. It was an old building, one of the ones built back when Riverside still had an economy. Easier to climb those things than the smooth metallic walls of the enforcers' or the clinic.  
  
She counted four Reds up on the roofs, all presumably playing sentry. Three of them were doing their jobs well, but the fourth... If she got herself into the right position, hanging down from the edge, just out of sight, she could probably yank him over into thin air before he had time to wake up properly. The fall would be enough for keep him out of commission for a good long while, if it didn't kill him outright. Neither ending was particularly desirable; a living soul with multiple broken bones and a working set of lungs could raise all sorts of ruckus, and a dead Red would attract a hell of a lot of attention.  
  
Shepard found a nice wide windowsill on the right side and settled in to wait, crouched low and feet settled just right. It was good weather for it, at least, not raining hard enough to hurt like the last time she'd done this sort of cat burglar crap, and she could smell the crap the lacklustre sentry was smoking. It was the same shit that was plaguing the Undercity, made people slow and stupid, easy pickings for the stronger and the sober. It also tended to knock people on their asses if they smoked too much of it and the sentry had the slightly-shaky hands of someone not used to moderation.  
  
The poor bastard finally slumped over and started snoring just as Shepard's knees started to ache. She hopped up onto the roof gratefully and dashed for the opposite side. The leap from there to the open window into Jojo's place was slightly longer than she would really have liked, but she made it, more or less, hands snatching at the sill just before she fell out of reach. She hung there a moment, catching her breath, then hauled herself through the window and into the building.  
  
There was a door, just to the right of the window, and she paused outside for just long enough to check there was no sound coming from inside before passing through it. A quick sweep to make sure it was deserted, and then she ducked behind the door itself, swung her bag down off her shoulders. There was no way she'd be able to wander around inside Jojo's place without someone spotting her, so the best she could do was to try and make sure they didn't realise it was her they were seeing.  
  
Thank God for the dress codes of the gangs.  
  
She pulled her bandana out of the bag, tied it over her nose and mouth. Her jacket was tucked away in favour of the non-descript faded black hoodie she kept for these sorts of moments; with the hood up to hide her hair and the bandana to hide her face, this might just work. Especially once she’d tied a strip of red around her arm, feeling her stomach roll unpleasantly when she tightened it firmly.  
  
It was just a disguise, she reminded herself as she tightened the cloth. Didn’t mean anything other than that the Reds were too damn certain of their position to bother checking who was wearing their colour.  
  
Still, might be a good idea to keep her distance from anyone and everyone.  
  
Shepard edged back out into the corridor, then remembered that the whole point of the disguise was to make it look like she belonged, and Reds didn’t edge around _anywhere,_ let alone their own bases. She stepped away from the wall, but kept her hands in her pockets and her head ducked down low, and started searching. Worked her way with a careful sort of casualness through the whole building, heading up to the roof and all the way down to the basement, ducking in and out of rooms and round corners to avoid brushing past anyone. So long as she made every turn like she’d been planning it all along, no one ever seemed to notice.  
   
She was in the basement, well, the first level of basement, when she realised precisely where Jojo would be keeping something as valuable as the first military-grade weapons in all of Riverside. His room, the one that he’d dragged plenty of unwilling people to over the years, the one that Shepard had seen the inside of far more times that she was ever going to be okay with. But she’d stopped promising herself _never again_ years ago and she knew Jojo wasn’t here. She knew the difference between Reds-getting-stuff-down and Reds-keeping-busy-to-keep-away-from-their-boss. So there was no real reason not to walk down the next flight of stairs and through the heavy door that was never locked when no one was inside. No real reason at all.  
  
The room hadn’t changed much since the last time she’d been there. Same scummy bed, same stuff on the walls that she didn’t want to look up. But the last time she’d been here, Jojo had had some sort of rare merchandise stashed away in here, that new spice that she hated so much. He’d shown it off to her, chatting about his work and his plans like she was interested, like she had some sort of right to know.  
  
She found the crate tucked away in one of the corners, unlocked and full to the brim. Must have been twenty, thirty pistols in there, all of them showing clear signs of tampering ‘round the power cells and cooling mechanisms. At least Jojo didn’t seem to be that fussy about how his guns were stored; they’d notice the missing piece as soon as they bothered to count them again, assuming that there was anyone in the Reds who still knew how to count, but a quick glance at the crate wouldn’t look any different.  
  
The pistol went into her bag, wrapped up and buried deep. And then she got the fuck out of that building as quick as she could without actually running.  
  
xxx  
She was so busy keeping her head down on her way out of central Red territory that she didn’t see Jojo until it was too late to hide. The only real option was to bit her tongue until the nausea died down and slap a smile on her face, all the while thanking whatever god might exist that she taken the red off her arm the second she was out of that building.  
  
“Shepard, it’s been too long since I last saw that pretty little face,” Jojo said, stepping right into her personal space. “You been avoiding me, sweetheart?”  
  
“Now, why would I do a thing like that?” She kept smiling, hoped to hell it looked genuine enough to pass. “Just been keeping busy. Lot of money to be made out there at the moment.”  
  
“When are you going to stop wasting your time with all that finder crap? You should come work for me, you know. Lot more money to be made with a little red on your sleeve.”  
  
“Oh, you know me, Jojo. Don’t like being tied down.” She knew the pistol was deactivated, she’d checked it twice before hiding it away, so there was no way it was actually producing the kind of heat that she could suddenly feel at the small of her back.  
  
“You seemed to like it well enough last time,” Jojo replied, stroking one hand down the side of her face. “This independent woman thing is all well and good, but sooner or later you’re going to need to start thinking about your future. Things are going to start changing around here. Changing fast. I know what you think about me. Pathetic king of a pathetic kingdom.”  
  
“That’s not what I-”  
  
“It’s okay. I know this place isn’t exactly worth running. That’s why I’m thinking of moving on. Just like you are. We should go together. Take the Reds out into the world.”  
  
“Your boys aren’t ready for that, Jojo. Ruling Riverside is one thing, and you do it very well, but taking on the outside is... You’d need an army, man. Bigger bribes, better guns. I just don’t see it going the way you want.”  
  
Jojo’s fingers tightened on her face. “Things don’t go any other way for me, Shepard.” But then he smiled, fingers loosening back into something that would, from anyone else, be called a caress. “Time for you to go, I think.”  
  
“Yeah,” Shepard agreed, risking a step backwards. “Yeah, I should-”  
  
“Just don’t stay away too long this time,” he called after her as she scurried away. “I get real lonely when you’re gone.”  
  
xxx  
Shepard barely made it out of Red territory before she started shaking. Of course, being out of Red territory didn’t mean safety or security, and so she had to find a conveniently deserted corner in which to huddle down and shake until the she could stuff the sound of Jojo’s voice back in the darkest corners of her mind.  
  
It was a trick she’d used before, one that usually worked well enough to get herself back under control. It wasn’t good enough to fool Doc, it certainly wasn’t good enough to fool Kes, not when that girl was smart enough to add _Shepard scared_ and _recent trip to Red Central_ and get the correct answer of _Jojo._ When the shaking had stopped, Shepard straightened back up and started walking. Not towards the clinic, she couldn’t take the risk that the Reds were still watching; best to drive any potential spies to distraction with a nice tour of Riverside before heading back to hand the stolen gun over to the Doc.  
  
She still had to get the confession, of course. She should have planned that a little better, really. She certainly shouldn’t have waltzed in Jojo’s home without a better idea of what she’d do when she inevitably ran into the bastard, but there’d be other chances. Shepard was so caught up in how to engineer a more relevant conversation with Jojo that it took her far longer than it should have done to notice what was so wrong in Riverside.  
  
Because, the thing was, crowds in Riverside were never silent. They gathered around brawls and shouted for their favourites, cursed the losers; they pushed each other out of the way or into place, always swearing at those who pushed them. Years ago, you might have heard laughter here and there, when so many were gathered together, maybe even the odd song or snatches of music. Shepard couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard music in Riverside, other than that Kes hummed softly under her breath. Sometimes, sometimes the crowds weren’t crowds at all, they were _mobs,_ surging in every direction, screaming in rage or in fear, or just plan screaming.  
  
But this mass of people, moving quickly and silently and all very certainly away from something, it wasn’t a crowd. It wasn’t a mob. Shepard had seen it before, plenty of times, always when the Reds had decided to make an example of someone, when everyone else decided that they didn’t want to stick around to become the next example. Kes had a word for these things, called them _exodus._  
  
The right thing to do with exoduses was to blend in, move along with all the other people and get as far away as you could before the Reds decided that a larger example was required. Shepard knew that, knew it better than her own name, and she’d joined plenty of these terrible exoduses over the years. But she also knew Riverside. She knew, with an icy certainty deep in the pit of her stomach, where the people were hurrying away from.  
  
People may have noticed when she started shoving her way through, going against the seemingly endless tide of people, but no one tried to stop her. They all had much larger concerns than one stupid kid intent on hurrying towards danger instead of away from it. The stream of people had slowed to a faint trickle by the time Shepard could smell smoke in the air, and by the time she could see the source, there really wasn’t any doubt about just who had caught Jojo’s attention this time. Anger and guilt, but no doubt. As if there had ever been any doubt.  
  
Shepard could still vaguely remember the first time she’d heard that an ex-soldier had come to Riverside, offering cheap medicare; she’d figured the rumour was about as accurate as the one about being able to gain full citizenship by sleeping with the right three officials. But the soldier really had come to Riverside and he really had come to offer medicare, as Shepard had discovered a few years back when she’d broken both her legs trying to evade the enforcers. And everyone had known that the clinic was off-limits, untouchable even to the gangs that ruled Riverside. Even to the Reds.  
  
Until now, Shepard supposed.  
  
The clinic’s door was just gone, the shutter half-torn off and oddly mangled. The building itself wasn’t the source of the smoke; it looked as though the Reds had dragged out most of the furniture that hadn’t been nailed down and set it on fire. Hell, they’d even dragged out some of the stuff that _had_ been nailed down, Shepard thought that she could see the charred remains of one of the examination tables.  
  
She really didn’t want to go into the clinic itself. She didn’t want to _know_ what she only suspected.  
  
But she’d seen Jojo’s work before, after the fact and in person and even in the nightmares which had only really started once she’d let Kes into her life. And she’d seen what he did to those who weren’t really the target, the ones who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or, God forbid, the ones who actively tried to get in the way, and there was no way that the Doc would have ever willingly got out of Jojo’s way.  
  
There was a Red standing just inside what remained of the door. Shepard would never quite remember what happened to him – what she did to him – but it probably had something to do with the knife that had made its way from her boot to her hand. And then there was blood on the knife, blood on her hand and sleeve, and so much more blood on the floor of the clinic. Those bright smears led Shepard’s eye towards the office, to the sprawling body of another Red slumped there against the wall. Judging by the visible hole in her stomach and the pretty impressive blood pool around her legs, she’d bled out. A slow death, the sort of death that should never have happened at all in Doc’s clinic.  
  
Shepard stepped carefully over the woman’s legs into the office. It didn’t seem to have fared any better than the main room; there was marginally less blood on the floor, but the desk had been overturned, pinning someone to the floor.  
  
The figure under the desk wasn’t Kes. The clothes were too expensive, the boots too big. It was Doc, and he wasn’t moving. He’d once shown her how to tell if someone was alive or dead, all things to do with pulses and breaths and heart-rates, but she’d barely been listening at the time and she certainly couldn’t remember it now. She settled for shoving the desk off him, then went to the well-hidden panel in the corner. The Reds hadn’t touched it, unsurprisingly; even Shepard had first found out about it in the good old days when she’d been deeply paranoid of the good doctor and had been spending days at a time spying on him to make sure that he wasn’t dealing in slaves or experimenting on the Unregs, and Jojo had never considered the Doc worthy of that sort of attention. Getting the panel open was a little more complicated; the code had been changed since those days, but the wiring was as crap as ever; you’d almost think the man hadn’t spent most of the last few years surrounded by  thieves and undesirables.    
  
Shepard had, fortunately, been paying attention on the day when the Doc had talked her through his emergency contact system. It helped, admittedly, that the system only really had one function and, therefore, one button. She smacked it with a fist and stared blankly at the screen until it lit up. No picture, just a white dot in the centre, no way to tell who was listening at the other end of the broadcast. Maybe Doc’s partner, the strange man who was as detached as Doc was connected. Maybe Gibson, even though Shepard had never seen the two of them together, never heard one mention the other.  
  
“Jojo hit the clinic,” she said finally, uncertain if the words would be understood, if whoever was listening would even care. “Doc needs help.”  
  
And then, because there was no sign of Kes anywhere in the ruins of Doc’s carefully-created sanctuary, Shepard walked out of the office, out of the clinic, and started on the way back to Red territory.  
  
She knew exactly where Kes would be. She’d be exactly where Shepard had always sworn she was never going to end up; it didn’t even matter that she’d never made that promise outside of her own mind because Jojo would just _know_ how much it would destroy her _.  
  
_ The streets were mostly deserted; the few people she saw scuttled out of sight the moment they realised she was there. Riverside could always tell when the dead were walking. Even the Reds out and about would only let themselves stare once she was past them and therefore unable to look at them in return. Shepard walked into Jojo’s place through the front door, as if she owned it instead of being owned by it, and wasn’t that surprised when the guards just let her pass.  
  
The corridors inside were packed with more Reds - enough that Shepard suddenly realised just how empty this place had been before, just how much Jojo had played her - but they all cleared out of her way the moment she got close. Like Jojo's intense focus on her was something you could catch. The crowd thinned out the deeper she went into the base until, when she walked down the last awful staircase, there was only one in sight. Finney, loitering outside Jojo's room like some sort of idiot kid runner.  
  
He wouldn't meet her eye as she walked past, another hint at just how terribly wrong this had all gone. Finney had known Kes, after all, and Jojo was always attentive to his people's interests and relationships. He probably hadn't been made to watch, though. With something like this, Jojo would rank his own pleasure and privacy over the chance to make a point to someone as insignificant as Finney.  
  
Kes was on the bed, sprawled across the middle. There was blood on her face and smeared across her limbs and torso, more of it on the sheets. Her hair was matted and tangled, torn out of its braids, and her eyes were open. She would have been staring at Shepard, if the dead had been capable of staring at anything.  
  
Shepard didn't shut her eyes. She kept looking, taking it all in until every little detail of what she had let happen was burnt into her memory, and only when that was finished did she cross the room to what was left of Kes. Using her sleeve, she wiped the blood from Kes' face, tucked her hair back behind her ears, then pulled the sheet up to cover up everything else that had been done to her. There were things on her mind, things that maybe she should have said long before, but it was too late now and so she stayed silent.  
  
"He's on the roof," Finney said, still standing outside the door. "You probably shouldn't keep him waiting."  
  
"When he killed Jacknife," Shepard replied, ignoring his comment. "Was that because of Jacknife or because of you?"  
  
Finney sighed. "It was because of me."  
  
"And then he tied red around your arm and let you live and you just went along with it. You signed on with his murderer just like that. Shit like that is why everyone thinks that we're not worth saving, hell, it's why they're _right_."  
  
She'd never figured out if it had been common knowledge, the whole thing with Jacknife being more than just a Son, with him being Finney's actual son, but she was pretty damn certain that she was probably the first person to throw it in Finney's face. Well, the first apart from Jojo, but he didn't really count as a person.  
  
Shepard took one last look at Kes, kissed her cold forehead, and walked out of the room again. Finney was still silent, looking paler than when she'd entered, and she was halfway up the stairs before he spoke again, sounding more broken than she'd ever heard before.  
  
"Do you really think I don't regret it?"  
  
"Doesn't much matter what I think," she called back, not taking her eyes off the steps in front of her.  
  
She'd left the gun at the clinic, she realised. The gun, her knife, anything that she might have been able to fight with. Pity, really; she'd never quite wrapped her head around the whole 'irony' thing, but she was fairly certain that shooting Jojo with one of his own guns would have counted. Not that she really thought that a gun would change what was about to happen; she could have all the guns in Riverside and she'd still really only have two options in front of her. End up like Finney, or end up like Kes.  
  
Shepard would take the second option a thousand times over, no doubt about that.  
  
Finally, she was at the bottom of the last staircase. She paused, for just a moment, and let herself think about Kes. Not about the girl who first come to Riverside, or the one who’d taken Shepard into her life, the one who laughed more than anyone else Shepard had ever met, or the one who’d woken up from nightmares more often than she didn’t. Instead, Shepard thought about the Kes lying on Jojo’s bed.  
  
This wasn’t about who Kes was. This was about what had been done to her.  
  
Shepard hadn’t really had a plan for what to when she was actually facing Jojo, not when all she had was the intense desire not to submit and not a damned idea about what that actually meant. She hadn’t really thought about what Jojo might do, what she might do in return. And she certainly hadn't expected this confrontation to start with a thrown knife.  
  
Shepard had only dimly registered the pain in her thigh when the leg gave out from under her. She twisted as she fell, just barely managing to avoid landing on the knife and, with that accomplished, she could focus on the blinding pain.  
  
“Oh, my little Shepard,” Jojo said softly, coming close enough to stroke her hair out of her eyes. “It shouldn’t have happened like this. You should have come to me long before any of this was necessary. But if I have to cripple you to keep you, _I will_.”  
  
His other hand was suddenly on her thigh, digging in just below the blade, and she screamed. She lashed out with her good leg, but her shitty boots didn’t even do that much damage on the days when she had enough strength to kick properly.  
  
“You see, that’s why it has to be you.” Jojo’s fingers loosened on her thigh and Shepard could breathe again. “You fight. Even when you shouldn’t, you fight. My boys are going to need that. _I’m_ going to need that when I lead them out into the world that should be ours. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To get out of this cage that all the real people like to keep us in. Even your little friend could see that and she wasn’t that smart, was she? I mean, she really thought you’d come back here in time. I don’t usually like it when my girls shout someone else’s name, but I didn’t mind it this time,” Jojo continued, almost thoughtfully. “It was almost like you were there, really.”  
  
Shepard’s fragile self-control shattered and she spat in his face. He backhanded her, almost casually; one of his rings caught in her eyebrow piercing and he yanked his hand free without a moment’s hesitation. The small silver ring hit the roof with a faint clink as blood started pouring down into Shepard’s eye.  
  
Jojo turned away, looking out across the badly-lit dump that he’d always been so intent on ruling. He was still talking, going on and on about his grand plans, voice rising unsteadily, but Shepard tuned out and turned all of her attention to the knife sticking out of her. Decent sized blade, if the way it was practically against her bone was anything to go by, but the handle was a little smaller that Shepard liked. And it was - or had been meant to be - decorative, which usually meant shitty grip even before it was splattered with slippery blood.  
  
But it was all she had, and it was a hell of a lot more than she'd been expecting.  
  
She wrapped one hand around around the knife, braced the other on her thigh, pressed up against the blade, and started to pull. The first slight movement of the blade made her head spin, leg throbbing in time to the rolling of her stomach, but she gritted her teeth against the pain and sick feeling of metal against flesh and kept going.  
  
The knife came out, millimetre by agonising millimetre. Shepard kept it firmly in her hand as she struggled to her feet, certain that if she let it go she wouldn't be getting it back. Standing was interesting; there was more blood running down her leg now, without the knife to hold it in, and this was probably why the Doc always hesitated before taking things out of people. Too late to worry about that, not when her body was very clearly only going to tolerate her insane need to move for so long before putting her back down hard.  
  
Shepard limped forward one tiny step, biting through her lip to stop from screaming, and then took a slightly larger step, then another. The roof wasn't that big. Hardly any distance at all. The knife was still in her hand, right where she needed it to be, and she watched Jojo, still edging her way towards him, waiting for the moment he moved.  
  
When it came, when she spotted the little shifts in cloth and muscle that meant Jojo was about to turn, Shepard threw the knife. It was half a second too soon, or maybe half a second too late, and slightly wide, but it carved a decent gash across the damn red tattoo on Jojo's arm.  
  
The surprise made Jojo take a half-step back and that was all Shepard needed. She threw herself forward, leg screaming in agony and she screamed along with it, catching Jojo around the waist and letting momentum take over.  
  
If she'd been in a little less pain, been a little less broken or a little less angry, maybe Shepard would have been able to stop herself from following Jojo over the edge. As it was, she didn't really care.  
  
xxx  
 _Iowa Central City,  
Six Months Later,  
  
_ Hackett knocked on the door for eight minutes straight before it finally slid open, revealing one deeply unimpressed looking Gibson.  
  
“You stopped answering my messages,” Hackett said when she just glared at him. “Figured I’d drop by and make sure your personal communicator was working properly.”  
  
“I stopped answering your messages because there was nothing more to say and your obsessive tendencies are a lot less cute when they’re not saving my life. Look, Steven, the Riverside deal is done,” Gibson said, her voice softening just slightly. “The Alliance knows what happened to your people; Jojo’s been posthumously convicted of all of it. Hell, even the Taskforce is back on, and with the Reds floundering around without their little psycho dictator, it might actually do some good this time around.”  
  
“But you’re still taking early retirement.”  
  
“Well, it takes a little of the joy out of helping the lost and downtrodden, knowing that the people above you only care because they’re scared of that shit spreading out into the real world. But you’ve never been that interested in my career or lack thereof, so how about we leap to the real matter on your mind.”  
  
“I want to see Shepard.”  
  
“There we go,” Gibson said, crossing her arms as she leant against the doorframe. “The kid’s fine.”  
  
“How the hell is she _fine_?”  
  
“It might have something to do with all that medical care she’s now entitled to with her fancy new citizenship papers. Certainly did wonders for the few remaining fragments of her shin bones. The rest of it, well, I’d imagine that unhappy endings are a lot easier to deal with when you’ve never expected anything different.  And before you even think of saying anything at all along the lines of, ‘it was my fault’, let me point out that you had essentially no role in this last depressing chapter of Shepard’s life.”    
  
“I sent her after Jojo.”  
  
“For the love of all that is holy, stop making this about you. Jojo was obsessed with Shepard for years. Why do you think she started working with me in the first place?”  
  
“I just want to see her. You’re right about all of this starting long before I showed up, I know that, but it got worse after I arrived. I need to try and make it end better that it started.”  
  
xxx  
  
The noodle bar by the shuttles was actually pretty good; Hackett had been there once or twice, normally when a little drunker than regulations were strictly happy with. He hadn’t realised that it was low-key enough to hire an actual person to wash the dishes, but maybe Gibson had persuaded them. He waited across the street, trying to think of the appropriate way to start a conversation with a kid who he’d sent absentmindedly into her own personal circle of hell.  
   
He was still considering when he spotted Shepard walking out of the restaurant. She looked... different. The clothes were cleaner, admittedly, and a little newer, and she looked slightly less like she was two days away from starvation. Following her through the streets was probably a little creepy, but Hackett had made his peace with that. He was a little surprised, however, when she stopped outside a recruitment station, but then he saw the way she was staring at the stock image of the Alliance unit.    
   
“Come on, you,” he said, dropping a hand onto her shoulder. “I think we need to talk.”   
  
She shrugged his hand off immediately and glared at him, but she didn’t argue and she walked with him willingly down the street, even if she did somehow always managed to keep at least a foot of space between them at all times. There was a park somewhere down this street; Hackett had visited it before, and the little stall selling drinks and the weirdest assortment of snacks Hackett had ever seen was still there, open for business. He brought them each a cup of coffee and shoved one of the overly-sweet asari dumpling things into Shepard’s hands.  
  
They sat on a bench together, still with that good foot of space between them, and drank their coffee. Hackett realised right around the time that Shepard started trying to shred the reusable mug that the kid wasn’t about to start this conversation.  
  
“So, the Alliance?”  
  
Shepard shrugged. “It’s the easiest way to get offworld. The only other people who’ll take on someone like me are the mercs and mercs are just gangs with better weapons.”  
  
“And we all know how well you respond to gangs with better weapons.” The joke fell flat; it probably didn’t help that Hackett didn’t even know if he was joking. “But that’s all you want? To get offworld?”  
  
She nodded, but it was slow, hesitant.  
  
“What were you planning to do?” Hackett asked gently. “You and Kes, you must have had plans for when you got full citizenship.”  
  
“We were going to start running. Not sure if Kes was really ever planning to stop once we’d started.” Shepard finally seemed to accept that the coffee cup wasn’t destructible and put it down on the bench. “Apart from Kes, everyone good I’ve ever met came from the Alliance. And I know that doesn’t really say much about the Alliance, not really, but... They’d give me something to do. It might even be something worth doing. And I need something worth doing right now.” Shepard stood up from the bench and stuffed her hands deep in the pockets of her jacket. “After all, it would be a shame not to something more than wash dishes with my shiny new citizenship.”  
  
“It won’t be easy, kid. It’s not easy for anyone, but I imagine that it would even harder for you.”  
  
“Can’t be any worse than Riverside.” Shepard shrugged and started to walk away, but she only made it a few steps before stopping again. “You know, you should look me up in a few years, Hackett. Maybe the next time we work together, it’ll go a bit more smoothly.”  
  
“You’ve already enlisted.”  
  
“Two days ago,” Shepard called back. “But thanks for the talk anyway!”  
  
Hackett leant back against the bench, shut his eyes against the glare of the sun, and did his very best not to laugh like lunatic.


End file.
